Cam Neely talks buyouts, fighting and Jarome Iginla’s future

Cam Neely, Jeremy Jacobs and Charlie Jacobs held a press conference Tuesday at TD Garden to wrap up media availability for the 2013-14 season.

Though little news emerged from the press conference, Neely did say that the team has not discussed using compliance buyouts on any of their players. Peter Chiarelli vowed not to use them last season, and Neely hinted the same might go for this offseason.

“We haven’t talked about that, no,” Neely said.

Teams are not allowed to buy out injured players, so even if the team wanted to buy out a veteran like Chris Kelly (two more years with a $3 million cap hit), the herniated disc that caused him to miss the playoffs could get in the way of such a move.

One thing discussed annually at these press conferences is the status of the team’s next practice facility, and Charlie Jacobs gave little update.

“We just had a meeting about our practice facility and [there are] a couple of different options,” Jacobs said. “[It’s] best that I keep where we’re at right now a little close to the vest and say that we are moving along, and pursuing two distinct possibilities, both within 15 miles of the rink here.”

The two possibilities are believed to be the facility being built in Brighton next to the New Balance building and a potential facility that would be built next to the Garden.

Here are some of the other topics that were discussed:

– Neely wasn’t a fan of his team getting itself in hot water during the playoffs, such as on Milan Lucic‘s spear of Danny DeKeyser, Shawn Thornton squirting P.K. Subban with a water bottle and Lucic’s threats during the handshake line at the end of the second round.

“You don’t like to see that happen,” Neely said. “The stick work is something that, you know, now-a-days you just can’t get away with. There’s two referees, there’s all kinds of cameras, there’s reporters that tweet information out as soon as it happens. You can’t get away with certain things like you used to be able to do. The water bottle incident is something that as an organization you don’t like to see happen to be quite honest with you. Stick work happens, it’s not just our team that does it, it does happen. I can tell you this, in handshake lines there’s probably worse things that have been said that just don’t get public. In the history of handshake lines, I can almost guarantee that.”

– Neely defended the lack of movement at the trade deadline. The team tried trading for Alexander Edler, but that deal fell through and the team had to settle for Andrej Meszaros, a depth player who served mostly as a healthy scratch in the postseason.

“I can speak to what we tried to do at the deadline. Not in detail, but with what was available and how we thought we wanted to add as opposed to add and subtract, we thought we had something in place but it was predicated on another team making a deal and it didn’t pan out,” Neely said. “But again, we were going through that really good stretch of hockey and we thought we really just needed to add some depth and if a player with term became available, like the one we were trying to acquire, it would have been a bonus for us. But obviously I don’t think that is the full reason why we didn’t get past the second round, to be honest with you.”

– Jarome Iginla is the biggest name on the team set to hit free agency. Because of the cap penalties the team will have to pay for his one-year deal from last season, the Bruins’ best shot at keeping him is to get him to take another one-year, bonus-padded contract. Neely would like the player to return.

“I thought he started out a little slow when he came on, he came on late and he came on strong,” Neely said of Iginla. “Obviously he’s a leader, he’s the captain of another team for a long time and he came in and added in an element to our group, especially the forward group. He ended up scoring 30 goals which is not easy in this league anymore and we would like to try and see if we can figure something out moving forward with him. We will see where that goes but I thought he fit in really well with our team.”

– Neely didn’t say where things stand with Thornton, though he did echo Peter Chiarelli’s sentiments about there being less of a place in the NHL for fighters.

“I still believe that we like the physical game and physical play which at times leads to dropping the gloves,” Neely said. “But there’s always been a lot of talk, primarily with the media, about you know, ‘is fighting still necessary in our game?’. I think with the way the game’s played and how it is played and how physical it is, I still feel it is still part of the game. But where it goes, you see from like 70s, 80s, 90s, it’s a little different or probably still trend that way, yes.”